Thursday, September 1, 2011

Howard Waldrop: My GM's Library

The Set Up Tangent

I was aware of Howard Waldrop before I
was aware of Howard Waldrop. In grade school I recall looking over
the shelves of the bookstore we went to and seeing The Texas-Israeli
War. It looked like strange book and at that age, I really didn't get
it. But I always looked at it and remembered the weird title. Then in
high school, I bought most of the new Ace Science Fiction Special
series, edited by Terry Carr. That included Gibson's Neuromancer,
Robinson's The Wild Shore, Scholz & Harcourt's Palimpsests and
Shepard's Green Eyes. But the one I read a couple of time, simply
because I couldn't wrap my head around it, was Waldrop's Them
Bones. It completely threw me, something so different from what I
was reading at the time (PK Dick, Tanith Lee, Harlan Ellison, Marion
Zimmer Bradley, Piers Anthony, and so on). Stupidly I never thought
to follow up on that book. It didn't even register to me that Waldrop
wrote the set up story to the Wild Cards universe, "Thirty
Minutes Over Broadway!", even though I read that a couple of
years later.

It actually took a strange link up of
events to get me to finally focus in and catch what was going on. In
1989/90 I did my junior year of college abroad at American University
in Cairo. It was a strange experience. In the second half of the year
I managed to pull together a serious GURPS group and ran a campaign
which had a solid beginning, middle and end. Since other forms of
entertainment: TV, movies or going out to bars had significant
barriers, gaming offered a nice outlet. But even more than that,
reading. You could find amazing cheap editions of books in stalls on
the street- usually in Britsh editions. Often you could find weird
authors and a good deal of sci-fi. That's how I finally read all of
Dune, a bunch of WS Burroughs I couldn't find in the States, Borges,
Amis, and even PD James. These got passed around in our community.
There was a girl I realized later I was in love with, Ann, and another
I was seriously infatuated with who played in the game, Ellen. From
the former I learned to be a more outgoing person, from the latter I
got great books.

Strange Stories Read Close Up

The best, by my reckoning, was Strange
Things in Close Up, a Legend Books anthology bringing together
Waldrop's short story collections Howard Who? and All About
Strange Monsters of the Recent Past. Ellen didn't like the
collection so much- she was an Egyptologist and had some issues with
one of the stories. But I loved it- I loved the work and craft that
went into every story. I read the collection over three times and
then someone borrowed it and I never saw it again. I like to imagine
that the copy I got through Amazon used is the same copy, somehow
having made its way here by wild coincidence.

Waldrop most
often writes alternate history stories, the kinds of what-if and
world making things I love. But it isn't that he just comes up with a
premise- he absolutely works through it and finds a completely new
approach to it. As always I have to bring these things back to
role-playing games- and I think Waldrop offers a great model for GMs
thinking about new worlds. Not only about finding interesting corners
and niches in them, but about how to present that world carefully and
subtly to the readers. New worlds require info dumps, and Waldrop's
stories never feel like that. Instead they're refreshing- and
honestly I've learned about more cool and obscure things through
Waldrop than perhaps anyone else. A close second would be Ken Hite,
who is the Waldrop of the gaming world- I've always thought that. I
didn't know about Izaak Walton's background for I read “God's
Hooks!” or anything about Phlogiston before I read “...The World
as We Know't”.

I think my favorite story by Waldrop is
“The Passing of the Western.” Spoilers: because it is about an
alternate Wild West in which Rainmakers battled Robber Barons. But it
doesn't tell that story- instead it sort of tells that story in
telling about the Western movies made in the early 20th
Century based on those tales. But it doesn't even tell that directly,
instead the stories in the form of pieced together articles and
interviews from film magazines looking at those movies.

And it works. And I love it. And I love
the idea that you can tell a story that indirectly and let the pieces
accumulate for an effect. I think that applies fully to comic book
storytelling and to gamemastering at the table.

I recommend you read Waldrop if you
haven't. Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past,
Night of the Cooters, Things Will Never be the Same: Selected Short
Fiction 1980 – 2005 or Other Worlds, Better Lives: Selected Long
Fiction 1989-2003 are all great places to start. If you like Ken Hite's Suppressed Transmission series or even just smart and remarkable sci-fi, then read waldrop.

Punch-Line

Why am I telling you this? Why am I
going on in this way? Well mostly because I wrote an alternate
universe story, DC Comic's Project Superman from Flashpoint. Mind you I had a
lot of circumscribed and directed plot points from the powers above,
but I got the chance to muck with the history. When I went to write
it, I went back and re-read all the Waldrop stuff. Which leads me to
this picture my sister, author Cat Rambo, took at ArmadilloCon 2011.